f. Senior staffers on the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign (“Defendant’s Campaign” or “Campaign”)—whose sole mission was the Defendant’s re-election—told the Defendant on November 7, 2020, that he had only a five to ten percent chance of prevailing in the election, and that success was contingent on the Defendant winning ongoing vote counts or litigation in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Within a week of that assessment, the Defendant lost in Arizona—meaning he had lost the election.
g. State legislators and officials—many of whom were the Defendant’s political allies, had voted for him, and wanted him to be re-elected—repeatedly informed the Defendant that his claims of fraud in their states were unsubstantiated or false and resisted his pressure to act based upon them.
h. State and federal courts—the neutral arbiters responsible for ensuring the fair and even-handed administration of election laws—rejected every outcome-determinative post-election lawsuit filed by the Defendant, his co-conspirators, and allies, providing the Defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.
12. The Defendant widely disseminated his false claims of election fraud for months, despite the fact that he knew, and in many cases had been informed directly, that they were not true. The Defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plans to defeat the federal government function, obstruct the certification, and interfere with others’ right to vote and have their votes counted. He made these knowingly false claims throughout the post-election time period, including those below that he made immediately before the attack on the Capitol on January 6:
a. The Defendant insinuated that more than ten thousand dead voters had voted in Georgia. Just four days earlier, Georgia’s Secretary of State had explained to the Defendant that this was false.
b. The Defendant asserted that there had been 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania. The Defendant’s Acting Attorney General and Acting Deputy Attorney General had explained to him that this was false.
c. The Defendant said that there had been a suspicious vote dump in Detroit, Michigan. The Defendant’s Attorney General had explained to the Defendant that this was false, and the Defendant’s allies in the Michigan- 8 -
